Carbon-Aware Energy Cost Minimization for Distributed Internet Data Centers in Smart Microgrids

In this paper, we investigate the problem of minimizing carbon-aware energy cost for distributed Internet data centers (IDCs) in smart microgrids. Specifically, a socially responsible IDC operator intends to jointly minimize the long-term energy cost and carbon emission in IDC operations. Since the future system parameters (e.g., electricity price, workload, renewable energy generation, and carbon emission rate) are random, we formulate the above-mentioned problem as a stochastic program to minimize the time-averaged expectation of the weighted summation of energy cost and carbon emission with guaranteed quality of service for service requests. Then, we design an operation algorithm to solve the formulated problem based on Lyapunov optimization technique without requiring any knowledge about system statistics. Finally, evaluations based on real-life data show that the proposed operation algorithm can achieve lower energy cost and carbon emission simultaneously compared with the carbon-oblivious algorithm.